Does free will exist, or are all of our actions predetermined?

Does free will exist, or are all of our actions predetermined?

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free will exists but only god's will persists.

I'm going to just wait and see what I think.

Free will is an illusion implanted into man by the adversary of man.
Only God can have free will, we are just his constructs.

>actions predetermined
>implying our future is already generated

Non religious answer; probably not. If you knew every single variable you could predict what someone will do every time, it's just so complex it seems there is free will. Proof; you can predict what friends/family will do in certain situations, because you understand them

when cause and effect get complicated enough, you might call it free will.

In this world... Is the destiny of mankind blah blah

Free will can't even be defined in a philosophically or scientifically meaningful way without directly leading to the answer 'no'.

You can't know.

Ultimately you're a product of nature, the conglomerate of every single act your ancestors carried out that led to their procreation. Those acts have shaped them, and you through your genes. Whatever you are as a person is a mix of these genes and the environment you have been exposed to. What choice do you have between them as a child?

At the same time, time is an illusion. We experience time in a linear fashion because our brains arrange it in a linear fashion, but that's not how time works. At the same time, your touch, your hearing, your vision, your taste and your sense of scent are all processed at different speeds at different times, and your brain rearranges all these different bits into one single stream, but it's still an illusion. Decisions you make are based on brain activity that PRECEDES your conscious awareness.

At the SAME time, the entire physical world is an illusion. Atoms are in a state of constant flux, they exist in different times and different locations and dimensions simultaneously, but the mere act of LOOKING at them, gives them fixed properties.

The whole idea of free will and predetermination is a human construct and neither exist in this universe. You are simply the result and part of an ongoing process of various atoms interacting. It's not predetermined by any means, but at the same time you're controlled by forces that exceed your ability to understand or even remotely control them by a factor of several millions.

Enjoy.

Bam! Just used my free will to create free will!

but why you gotta run the party?

it's not that complicated

when a dog smells another dog in heat they go crazy and have to mate. they don't have a choice in the matter

humans make choices according to reason.

*ruin

The world is thermodynamically predetermined. Local complexity (order) can only increase at the cost of increasing global disorder an even greater amount.
To give an example: no water molecule in a river moves exactly alike, and some even stays relatively at place or moves back (in a vortex, for example). But the mass of the river will always flow to the lowest possible point.

Your decisions are based on past actions and events that influence your next decisions. You feel like you have a choice because you are presented with them every day but really think about it (lel), you can't go back and redo that decision. There is no way to claim that all things the same, you would have picked B over A this time.

predetermined, sad but true.
they call it prarabdha-karma. this is fate.

Crows do too.

youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04

I think this is pretty close. But more complex. Consider every time you leave the house your interactions shape you. Every new thing you learn reshapes your brain and thus your understanding of the world. You are the result of biology AND experience.

This too.

If contingency were random in nature you wouldn't know it anymore than if it were determined. Try harder.

Determinism is the ultimate redpill

there's a difference between logic and reason.

You can be sure that when someone calls you a cuckboy bottombitch, it's God's will.

The issue is that if there is no free will, that means everything is deterministic, which is tautological.

So, you end up saying nothing and getting nowhere.

>Implying it isn't
Where's the universe's random number generator? Everything is just going to follow natural law and end up where it's destined to.

>So, you end up saying nothing and getting nowhere
Which is what you were going to do anyway.

>implying it's not

the entire universe abides by laws, how are we seperate from the universe? just because we're aware of the universe doesnt mean we can change it. we're still subject to the way our brain reacts to out environment.

Free will is nonsense and science is already undermining that dumb theory and will completely dismantle it within next 15 years.

Free will doesn't exist. Determinism is right. But I don't think it really matters. Computers can't create actual random numbers, but what they can do is close enough to the real thing.

>Almost the perfect human being
>Why marry a +10 year mother? who had past two husbands.
Are white people this cuck

Sorry forgot picture

i have a degree in analytic philosophy from the top philosophy dept in america. AMA

i will break down how free will is a problem:
>things happen in the world, some of them involving humans. we call these things events.
>our naturalistic understanding of the world is that events occur mechanistically. think: a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball, causing a transfer of momentum. another example would be water eroding rock into a canyon.
>when we say that these events occurred mechanistically, we mean that they are governed by causal laws that seem to apply to all matter
>the causal structure of events involving matter is such that we say the event couldn't have occurred otherwise than it did, at least when controlling for all other factors (think: the billiard ball couldn't have NOT moved when struck by the other billiard ball; the bedrock couldn't have NOT eroded when faced with a stream going across it.)
>humans are matter, and so it would appear that the events involving us are no less mechanistic than the events of the rest of the world
>and yet, unlike the rest of the world, it seems that some events involving humans, namely: actions, indeed COULD have gone differently -- our intuition is that the agent in question could have done otherwise if he had so chosen (example: i could have shat my pants while sitting in my chair instead of getting up to sit on the toilet as i am now doing)

so the problem lies in figuring out what accounts for the sense we have in which events involving humans could have gone down differently; ie: how it is that, in some events involving humans, it is perfectly coherent to say a person could have done otherwise. free will is a proposed solution to how this is the case, but it is rife with huge conceptual problems.

> implying people follow their environment variables because they have to and not because its comfortable or habit

I've never seen a coherent argument against free will.

Yeah Sam Harris does his little act where he tells you to think of a movie, then he says "oh, but why didn't you think of 'x'? See free will doesn't exist because you didn't have the option to choose that!"

Nobody has ever argued that we have complete control over our mind and external factors. Thoughts come and go out of nowhere. What we mean by free will is that choices are up to individuals.

Don't come at me with "oh yeah what about that guy with the brain tumor, he didn't have a choice!" That's a rare case where an external factor (a tumor) did prohibit his free will

Sorta. You have the illusion of a 'self', which cannot be proved in a scientifically controlled way. On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence which, while not disproving the self, leans considerably against it.

You can analyse the results of brain damage and neurological experiments to discover that it seems your 'consciousness' is pretty much unconscious.

Will answer questions but further readings which will explain it better than me are a A Very Short Introduction to Consciousness by Susan Blackmore and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

but you can control your mind

go ahead and sit down and breathe still everyday for 10 mins and youll be in control of your thoughts in a few weeks

all random events just seem to be random ones. the logic of happening is illogical and doesn't depend on us.

In the field of reinforcement learning (AI and human), there is the utility function for taking actions in a given probability distribution of states (state of the external and internal world) you think you are likely to be in. This action selection can be noisy (e.g. softmax function) and is highly influenced by contextual information. This adequately accounts for why people make slightly different choices when confronted with similar situations: noise in the brain systems determining action selection + slight differences in the situation.

Sam Harris argues that you can't because you don't have the choice of thinking of something that you didn't think of.

For example, it's pretty impossible to think of every single movie that you know. So when someone asks you to name a movie, you didn't have the choice to think of a movie that you didn't think of.

...

The illusion of free will. Some day in the future from the day you were born you would make that post and there it is. Feng Shui; flow like water.

How do I decide which book about free will to get? There are so many, I cannot decide and I could spend forever looking over and never decide and make a choice. Pleasesomeone recommend a book I'm so stumped

Does it matter? The illusion of free will is enough.

So when you put a penis in your mouth god willed it? I don't think so pal.

we can probably assume correctly that the universe is following precise laws and that nothing in it happens without a cause, if this is true then there's no reason to believe we can be an exception given how everything we perceive about ourselves can be traced back to being part of this universe too.

if we knew the rules and the precise arrangement of everything in the universe we could fast forward and rewind the events in the universe as we please and we have no indication to believe the same process will lead to different results like you wouldn't for any basic physics problem that albeit comparatively way simpler would result practically similar in principles.

the funny thing is when you start formulating absurd situations:
assume for a moment you have a computer so powerful it knows, like suggested above, the exact arrangement of things in the universe and its laws, then ask it to visualise on a screen what would happen 1 minute in the future in the room this screen is placed, finally put someone who absolutely wants to (or is programmed to) do something different from what's displayed.

i'm not sure what you're talking about and what you mean by "state of the external and internal world". and i'm not talking about why it is that events transpire differently when they pertain to different people, but rather the sense in which, for any of these individuals, we can conceive of them choosing otherwise than they did, for any action in their power, while controlling for all other factors. controlling for all other factors negates the explanation of "noise" as an explanation for how variation in outcomes can occur; "noise" is just one more variable to be accounted for in the set of properties governing how events involving matter transpire.

false dichotomy

well that's how the brain works

he's kinda arguing for human limitations. " we can't fly thus we aren't truly free". "we can't think of evrerything at once, therefore we aren't free", " we can't choose what comes to our mind first, therefore.. etc.". but humans learn, what you say could be regarded as a skill or habit a human could learn, same as how we learned to fly with our ingenuity. our free will allows us to choose doing things that we think are impossible.

if you regard what you said as a skill, then our free will clearly is beyond that. i have a choice in learning how to do what you described, it would take me time but it could be done. its an example


dunno

"god" isn't a factor. God is a primitive understanding of the universal forces.

always the fucking leaf

"Freewill" doesn't exist, nor does "Determinism".
Freewill is the idea that human beings may possess some form of effluent force into nature that is entirely independent of the underlying physical structure of matter which precesses events in an suspected ordered manner.

Determinism is the idea that physical systems may realize the neurological mechanisms which convey a reactive sequence of particles and forces that give rise to the function of consciousness.

My criticism of determinism is that it assumes that sensory information is entirely objective phenomenon (time, space, and other content of experience), when in consideration to a "scientific" sense of corporeal substance, it is lacking of all these features, in and of itself. Oblivion.

So from a nihilistic viewpoint, it forbears that the cognitive contemplations of substance are not complimentary to the physical nature of the reality we conduct ourselves in. But one in which we confide with our own perception of it, inherently imbued to the homo sapient brain with analytical modalities to theorize and quantify the recognized abstracted elements of empirical data of our environment.

Science is a philosophy of self.

none of the above
free will does not exist
our actions are random, because of quantum mechanics

You live in a simulation, every choice that you have made or will ever make has and will be determined by a set of algorithms.
You have free will to an extent, but your choices are predetermined by the program.

Wow nice argument. If you put that much though into everything you'll be flipping patties in no time.

>All these God comments
kys those

>because of quantum mechanics
meme mechanics

i wasn't arguing against you, leaf, just insulting you. no one likes a leaf on this board.

interesting question. I guess a really neutral, independent and objective free will does not exist. you are shaped to react or feel on influence X in a certain way, different to other humans, leading to different reactions. maybe you can think about your reaction rationally, but that's about it.

I wish I could make original posts with such quality as yours.

My free will just saved this image about freewill

If we do live in a simulation, I would sure like to see my life stats.
>you have drove x miles
>you have made a total of x dollars
>you went to x amount of places

They are determined. What else would they be? Caused by "quantum randomness"?

The concept of "free will" isn't just unscientific, it's illogical and basically falls into the problem of infinite regress. But it isn't just illogical either, it actually literally doesn't mean anything.
Noone could give a clear definition of what it means for will to be "free". Free from WHAT? Causality?

There is only determined or random, we can't even imagine any other state. And neither fits out idea of "freely choosing".

What the free will proponents then do is quite literally move the goalposts and redefine the meaning of free will. This is the essence of 'compatibilism'. But it is just that, moving the goalposts. This new definition is no longer what people actually MEAN and WANT when they say free will exists.

effectively predetermined

> you are shaped to react or feel on influence X in a certain way

Past experience doesn't take into account new experience, i.e. you could only MAYBE predict future behavior under a known circumstance but you cannot with an experience that has yet-to-be or is newly encountered.

All in all, it's a fruitless discussion.

the easiest rebuttal against my argument here is just that conceivability doesn't entail possibility, and so just because it is conceivable that one could of done otherwise does not mean it was actually possible that he could have done otherwise.

personally i don't really know where i stand on the debate but as a working premise i generally assume a weak form of free will in which some events are caused by the agent himself in my daily life. might be totally false but ehhh

It does exist, but in some people with personality disorders it doesn't.

...

Probably doesn't exist, but if I'm not able to fully see all the variables that lead to my own decisions, it's like it's there.

i used to be an atheist and hold most of the positions as you do now. looking back, you guys are missing out on a lot without spirituality in your life.

You wouldn't be able to predict it, no. But the person would only act how they would act which is determined by how they have learned to deal with unfamiliar situations in the past.

It's both, free will and determinism aren't mutually exclusive

>nice argument
after you committed the genetic fallacy...
Leaf...
Yes because saying "What will happen will happen." is not a proof of the existence of the future.

Yep this basically connects with your 'just because we can imagine it could happen doesn't mean that it can' in the sense that the system (brain) is fully determined by the physical world and the function (an abstraction for neural processes) it uses to choose actions in the world. With states I simply meant something akin to Wittgenstein's 'picture of the world', i.e. how the world is at that moment in time, and what propositions (encoded in the brain as beliefs about the world) are 'active'.

No, the easiest rebuttal is simply defining freedom and will and then asking if anything but the present infinite exists.

If the universe is one large chemical reaction, then no free will cannot exist as every decided outcome is based on it's predecessor

If there is a God, then every choice we make would be a miracle as it would go against the natural course

Does free will exist when you're outside of the body? or are you just another moth tricked by a bright light?

If you believe in god then you also believe that god is all seeing all knowing and all powerful, from that you can assume that he knows all that will happen to us. By allowing evil also god must know about it, so god must not care or allow it because he wants us to have free will. But if god knows of the occurrence of evil then he also knows the outcome and what we will do, and every action for that matter.
Regardless actions would be predetermined if you believe in god.
If you do not, then you can reason that all motions and actions are caused by a previous event, everything has a cause. You an trace that all back to a singular event which everything was determined and set into motion, again, here you can make a case that it is god. But then we know that it would still lead to predetermination as we discussed. So logically we can see that if you are a theist or not, things are predetermined.

There is a great deal of spirituality in my life. What you fail to do is disconnect the idea that spirituality = preconstrued religion.

Don't tell me what I believe or what I'm missing out on because you don't have the slightest idea. You christfags always sit on your high horse built of shit.

Free will is the only thing that makes sense

There are so many actions that humans do that serve no purpose whatsoever. There would be no reason for any force to cause these actions to happen and yet they do anyway

ok i'll bite: what's freedom and what's will, then? and does anything but the "present infinite" exist?

can you elaborate? are you talking about LW's tractatus or the investigations? LW's stance on science and even observation is very difficult to parse, particularly when it relates to the question of whether there is agent causation or not. i don't know what he's going on about in the tractatus, and i have only a very vague understanding of the investigations.

Can free will exist within duality where everything is just the head or the tail of the same dragon?

I would love not to be an atheist, but I can't believe in a god just because I want.
I know I would probably have a happier life, but it's not something that can be forced, sadly.

RARE
A
R
E

This is a false dichotomy unless you insist on defining free will as "being able to defy causality" (in which case the answer is a trivial and meaningless "no"). Unless you think it's impossible to make a meaningful distinction between the way inanimate objects act and the way self-conscious beings act, free will is a valid concept, in the same way that chaos is a valid concept in physics, even for systems that are known to be governed by deterministic rules For any sufficiently complex system, reasoning in deterministic terms becomes useless because of the sheer number of unknown factors and the complex interactions between them, so you're forced to think in probabilistic terms instead.

What do you choose to believe?

>What you fail to do is disconnect the idea that spirituality = preconstrued religion.
>implying
i'm not strictly religious, although i like the ideas of christianity, buddhism and co, got a lot of great insights.

>because you don't have the slightest idea.

You just made an absolute statement on what god is, not even i do that, but from that it seems that you're not really open to real spirituality.

do you believe only the material uni/multiverse we live in right now exists?

read up a little on this guy, he's a good starting point:
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Ramanujan
yeah i get you, but okay, i'll give you all a suggestions, read up on the buddhist and hinduist teachings, they're a good starting point.

if you want to experience spirituality, or god, or your soul, you have to seek it out, if you really want proof for it, you need to find it.

do read up on out of body experience, you can induce one yourself, it's similar to lucid dreaming but actually isn't. although it does take experience and training, a few weeks up to a week, depending on your willpower.

and you can prove your experiences were real, just go ahead and try it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

sorry, heres the english version

it does

but people are predictable

>They are determined. What else would they be? Caused by "quantum randomness"?

If not A, then B, the law of excluded middle.

>The concept of "free will" isn't just unscientific, it's illogical and basically falls into the problem of infinite regress. But it isn't just illogical either, it actually literally doesn't mean anything.
Noone could give a clear definition of what it means for will to be "free". Free from WHAT? Causality?

Infinite regress wouldn't necessarily mean illogical, but as a problem of self-referencing.

>There is only determined or random, we can't even imagine any other state. And neither fits out idea of "freely choosing".

The discretion of determined? One could argue that if I dropped a handful of marbles onto the floor, measure the topology of the floor, the amount of friction between the surfaces of marbles and the floor, and the works of such. One may conclude the predetermined arrangement the marble's set resting place at some point in time in relation to the position to the sun within some range of accuracy.

The argument of freewill tends to a concern for a comet to swing by and alter the period of the earth by some small, unaccounted error, which descends into a metaphysical consideration of metric and other long drawn out dialogs on how shit is truly unknowable.

>What the free will proponents then do is quite literally move the goalposts and redefine the meaning of free will. This is the essence of 'compatibilism'. But it is just that, moving the goalposts. This new definition is no longer what people actually MEAN and WANT when they say free will exists.

Like psychology? I believe in free will because some things are left for faith. I don't need to define god as being attributed qualities out of necessity. Yet, I will concur with you, arguments don't need to be either or, but not both.

>you have masturbated xxxxxxx amount of times

Yeah I was talking about the Tractacus, but honestly who knows what he is actually saying there. I just meant that the brain processes information about the external world from sensory inputs, and has an internal state (short-term memory, long-term memory, subjective feelings, etc), and using those two classes of information it produces a highly non-linear decision of how to act in the world in such a way as to maximize perceived utility. For instance you see a candy-bar, so your reward circuits send information to your motor cortex to reach for it, but at the same time you have an internal process which tells you that you are on a diet, and therefore this overrides the other process and you don't grab it.

This is based on the assumption that universe is binary, which isn't all there is, if we knew(all there is) then we wouldn't be here. Our current state is evidence of dis-confirmation of that fact.
>we're all guilty

I like to think as being a cog in the machine, in Hinduism we describe a chariot- where it has 5 horses each representation a indriya(wrong spelling, roughly translates to sense), the charioteer mind and passenger soul.

And whole idea is setting yourself free via various means attaining moksha- where you're free from all influences.

What I and everyone can experience for sure is that -Knowledge frees from pain, and understanding always brings happiness/pleasure unlike any materials are capable of. The pleasure of soul, going towards realizing your own state of 24/7 joy.

if you want to ditch your atheism, put yourself through something very trying to the point where you don't think you can live when left to your own devices. then go on living, and you'll begin to have the sense that you're not doing it alone, as it were. i know it sounds absolutely crazy, but that's what happened to me. i was a die hard atheist and i ended up a late state alcoholic. somehow i got through it and now i can't help but be a theist. an agnostic theist, but a theist nonetheless.

>you made an absolute statement of what God is
In the religious context yes. The concept that the concept of "god" is based off of exists, but nobody has it right, not even I do. We don't have the slightest understanding of the internal functions of the universe in order to determine how it acts. All we have is our personal understanding of the universe and our spirituality stems from our personal relationships with the universe. Subscribing to an ideology based on primitive man's relationship with the universe and even worse treating it as fact, is sad and premature.

He also cites the Libet experiments as proof that free will is an 'illusion', despite the experiments being heavily disputed (such as the experimenter-subject interaction having an effect on the outcome) and Libet himself stating that a person has the capability to veto the 500 ms potential build up before an act is being performed.

And his argument that free will can't happen because we can't choose to think before a thought appears in our heads is such bullshit. It's about whether that thought leads to action or not, many thoughts fleet in and out but we only choose to translate some of them into action.

Free will exists in a certain sense

If you have a lump of human shaped clay, it has one possible "future" dictated by the laws of physics.

If you have a human, it has a multitude of "futures", dependent ultimately on the physical make-up of one's brain, but also on an experience which emerges from that physicality. And that experience can effect the physicality of the brain.

So the illusion of free will derives from the fact that we have an emergent experience based on our physicality, which can alter itself.

While there are many more possible futures for the human compared to the lump of clay, ultimately only one can be chosen.

You are not doomed to a choice, but you are doomed to choose.

I'm not sure if this is Sup Forums or /r9k/

You can never know for sure, hence it doesnt really matter.

Determinism can only be seen in retrospective, which is a bit of a cheat.

What the fuck does it matter/what is the difference?
hurr my god is important in every conversation.
Kys

Only our consciousness has free will. Physically everything is on a set path. When we make a choice we jump to the closest dimension that reflects our intent. Like jumping trains. Some time by raw will or mistake we over shoot our jump and get the Mandela Effect